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A portable digital preservation roadshow kit

As a part of the lead up to Digital Preservation Day, the Cambridge team held a series of roadshows with a pop-up exhibition to raise awareness of digital preservation within the wider University. They wanted to let people know that there was a team that was concentrating in this area. They also wanted to find out people’s concerns regarding the long term continuity of the digital content that they create and digital content they use. Outreach and Training Fellow, Lee, writes about what is in the pop-up kit and how it can be used at your institution to generate awareness of digital preservation.

The exhibition kit

In the lead up to the exhibition we created a portable carry kit that so that we could repeat the exhibition in various locations day after day.

To stimulate discussion as well as having an interactive experience, the first portable exhibition consisted of:

An A1 poster, printed on cloth for ease of carrying and to reduce wear and tear. Images attributed as correctly as possible and in line with open and creative commons requirements.

Prototype exhibition poster.

A roll-up display banner with an image sourced from the Cambridge Digital Library (appropriately from the Book of Apocalypse), plus a bit of their Photoshop skills to make a corrupted version. I like to describe the image as the digital equivalent of mould affecting a precious manuscript. You can still see the image but it’s not quite right and so work needs to be done to put to ‘right’.

A laptop with the URLs to various playable games on the Internet Archive, to make the point about emulation and how digital is different from traditional media. The games we used were:

A small collection of tangible technology from the past to the present. This was sourced from the Fellows’ collections of materials and included:

8” floppy disk

25” floppy disk

5.25” floppy disk

5.25” floppy disk drive

Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R)

Commercial double sided film on Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)

Digital Versatile Disk ReWritable (DVD-RW)

A Hard Disk Drive 250GB from a laptop

2GB and 1GB Randow Access Memory (RAM) chips

USB stick with the hard cases removed to show the small PCB and memory chip

An SD card enclosure

A 2GB micro SD card

A micro SD card USB enclosure

An iPod c. 2012

An acetate, c. 1990, with degradation (courtesy of JISC’s Dom Fripp) to make a visual point through an analogue item about the degradation and the fragile nature of materials we are working with.

A close up of the tech on display.

As a part of future work we’d like to develop this into a more generic display kit for those who do not have the time to create such materials, but have an opportunity to run displays. When it’s up and running, this is how the display looked in the University Library’s Entrance Hall.

Roadshow display at set up in the Entrance Hall of the Cambridge University Library.

We also relied on the generous acceptance and space from the hosting venues so that we could come and visit. It was important that we toured around the site to widen the message amongst the Cambridge University community, so we visited to following venues:

Alison Richard Building – 16th November

Gordon and Betty Moore Library – 17th November

Department of Engineering Library – 20th November

University Library Entrance Hall – 21st November

Churchill College – 22nd November

Faculty of English Social Space – 23rd November

The following is a summary of some of the views captured from the Post-It notes. As it’s not part of a proper study, we removed the views that repeated each other. The most popular answer for the “what digital materials should be saved” question was ‘all’ or ‘everything’. Most thought that the Library should be responsible for the preservation of all materials and the most common challenges were money, time, and reacting to change.

Summary of Post-It note capture.

There was a lot of work put into the creation of the pop-up exhibition and it was developed carefully so that it could be used beyond the life of the DPOC project. We have created a resource that can be used a moments notice to begin the digital preservation conversation to a wider audience. We’d like to develop this kit a bit further so it can be personalised for your own outreach efforts.

Please get in touch if you would like to collaborate on this kit in the comments below or via the ‘contact us’ page.

This is great and I have been thinking about something similar myself and perhaps a bit sooner than next year’s IDPD. I think I need to work on getting me a display of obsolete formats…
How did you find people interacting with the games? Maybe there could be other sample web pages/spaces to display?
Definitely lots to think about here and i think I need to go about getting a budget together…